Why remake a bland but beloved thriller? Because movies should at least try to be as dangerous as life.

A confession: Until recently, I had never seen the original Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. I didn't even know how to pronounce the title. One-twenty-three? One-two-three? So I consulted my friend Martin, who knows about such intricate things — one-two-three, it turns out — and then he asked me why I wanted to know, and I told him Tony Scott was remaking it and I was about to see it. And Martin got very upset. It was as though I'd told him they were putting new faces on money, and Howie Mandel was going to be smiling out from every dollar bill.

So when I went to the little preview theater in Los Angeles and the lights went down and we were suddenly jolted by the guitar crunch of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," I nodded to myself: Here we go, loud and dumb.

And later, when I pushed a dusty tape of the original into my dusty VCR, I was expecting something else — I was expecting something great, because Martin is a reliable source. And what I saw as the tape unspooled was… not great. It was quiet and quirky, but that didn't make it good. It made it fall on the wide spectrum of competency somewhere between forgettable and decent.

Mr. Blue, played by Robert Shaw, is the English mercenary who leads three henchmen into the tunnels under 1974 New York, taking a subway car filled with stereotypical hostages and holding them for ransom. He's evil, pure and simple, no doubt about it. Good, in this instance, is portrayed by Walter Matthau in the form of Garber, a wry, gangly transit cop who talks Mr. Blue out of his worst impulses and brings justice to the rat's nest below the streets. They share uneasily this small, self-contained movie that's funny in spots and clever in spots, but it's not thrilling. It's clear how the caper will end before it begins. Good wins, evil loses. It's all very black-and-white.

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There's only one character who isn't: Mr. Grey — and he's the best part of the movie by a long way. Played by Hector Elizondo with a cool, gum-chewing menace, Mr. Grey is the guy who keeps an otherwise straightforward heist flick off balance. Even watching it today, thirty-five years after its release, with all that we've come to know and expect from this great and terrible world, it's Mr. Grey who still manages to stand out. (Actually, what really stands out is the racial humor — "The Puerto Ricans won't give a shit!" — but next in line is Mr. Grey.) He's not evil so much as he's chaos, the unknown element who could go either way, coming out of the shadows only to beat random innocents or make threats of sedition.

And so everyone — the hostages and the audience — is forced to keep one eye on Mr. Grey, just in case he goes off. He's the guy no one can figure and no one can predict. He occupies that vast unknowable middle, and the thrill is not in what he does but in what he might do.

Watching Mr. Grey on that subway actually reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Runaway Train — the movie I would be upset if someone remade. Runaway Train came out in 1985, and I've probably watched it at least once a year since. I loved it when I was a kid and I love it today, and that hardly ever happens. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts play inmates, old and young, who escape from a brutal Alaskan prison only to make the mistake of hitching a ride on a train without a driver and with no way to stop. It sounds simple enough, but it's directed by a Russian — Andrei Konchalovsky — with a weirdly Japanese philosophical bent and stars distinctly American actors with a tendency to shout. It ends with a quote from Shakespeare. In a lot of ways, it's a mess. (Konchalovsky, a few years later, also made Tango & Cash.) It shouldn't work, and in spots it doesn't. But the whole somehow overcomes its parts, although it's hard to explain why, exactly. Part of it may just be that, for some reason, a movie set in winter is almost always better than a movie set in summer. (Snow guarantees success: A Simple Plan,Fargo, The Sweet Hereafter, Runaway Train…)

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But ultimately Runaway Train works because circumstances and fate are in charge and out of control, so it's genuinely suspenseful, and the film looks starkly beautiful in places, and mostly because Voight and Roberts pull off the nearly impossible trick of making us root for a murderer and a rapist on the lam. Runaway Train is a great movie because it turns the villains into heroes — or at least into people you care about. They're the only part of the movie that isn't on rails. And neither of them ends up where you might expect him to go. They are redeemed in a way, but it's an ambiguous redemption. I like that there's nothing clean about it.

Nathan Fox

So, anyway… after Jay-Z finished rapping about bitches, I settled into my seat in the preview theater and soon unexpectedly found my mind turning to Runaway Train. Denzel Washington shows up as Garber, but this time he's not a cop. He's a dispatcher, an ordinary man about to find himself in way over his head. ("I didn't want to play another cop," Washington says over the phone later. "I liked the idea of Garber being a regular Joe. Out of shape, the guy who spills coffee on himself, who still has to bring milk home at the end of the day. That just made him more interesting for me.") By fate or fluke, he happens to find himself on the other end of the radio with a team of hijackers, this time led by a man named Ryder, this time played by an over-the-top John Travolta, a badass with a neck tattoo and a Fu Manchu. He's evil, pure and simple, no doubt about it. Of course he is. And of course there are all those things that signify to people like my friend Martin that a movie is retarded: a helicopter, a big car chase, a few thousand rounds of ammunition, and a lame joke about stage fright, all edited together in rapid-fire cuts. The movie starts out exactly the way you would expect it might. It's fast and violent and profane. It's unmistakably modern, and, sure enough, it's loud as hell.

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But then, as Garber and Ryder talk, and revelations are made, and they begin to make their confessions to each other, the lines begin to blur. Garber — who has his own mixed emotions — isn't all that good, and Ryder — who believes the city has done him significant wrong — isn't all that evil. Which means that despite its explosive excesses, the new Pelham somehow makes the old Pelham seem like the blunter instrument. It's that rare popcorn movie in which we're never sure whose side everyone is on or where they might end up, and that's because everyone in it is playing some version of Mr. Grey.

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And Tony Scott will probably catch a whack of shit for it. People like Martin forget that Scott made one of the all-time film-geek favorites in True Romance and that his brother, Sir Ridley (knight, auteur, creator of Gladiator), was the one who made G.I. Jane, and they will curse him not only for turning something quiet into something loud but for turning something darkly funny into something just plain dark and something proudly broad into something strangely subtle. That's not how the equalizers are supposed to be set. Loud and dumb, quiet and smart. Otherwise it's backward. So they'll sneer at Tony Scott, and they'll call him the stupid one, the talentless one, because Hollywood has trained us to expect certain things from certain people. These days, everyone's an archetype.

Except nobody really is.

After I left the screening, I went to see Scott in the offices he shares with his brother, overrun by dogs and hot young assistants. Before, when I thought ahead to our meeting, I thought it would be like sitting down with the Devil. I would look the Devil in his eyes, and I would gulp and tell him I liked his movie, just so things weren't too uncomfortable, and then I would sneak home and savage him. Instead, I did like his movie, and I liked him. In some ways, like the start of Pelham, he's exactly what you would expect him to be, a tightly bundled knot of anxiety and adrenaline. (Asked what he thinks of his latest work, he says, "It's, um, good. It's hard when you get close to it. I've had a love affair with every movie I've ever done. Some of them have been a disaster, but in the main, I've had a great time fucking them. But when the fucking's over, when the erection fades, you think, How good was it really?") Even Domino, that nightmare biopic on speed, makes sense after meeting him, and nobody could make a lick of sense out of Domino. "Yes, I lost my way a little bit on that one," Scott says, almost touchingly.

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And he keeps talking, and the more he talks — the more he reveals and confesses — the smarter he seems. He talks about how he began life as a painter and how he still draws his own storyboards and how he uses his camera like a brush to express emotions. He talks about how he needs a blockbuster's validation but still tries to find a way to satisfy his artist's heart. ("It's like being a drug dealer," he says of the Hollywood scramble. "The market is always changing.") And he talks about how he always tries to find a true-life counterpart for even his most outlandish characters, a flesh-and-blood person he can show his actor to ground him. "It gives me a confidence, a point of reference," he says. "The real world has always been far more exciting and funny and dangerous to me than anything somebody could conjure up sitting in front of a computer."

He's right. Take the two guys he figured on for role models for Travolta's accomplices, one of whom used to be Mr. Grey. Scott unearthed a pair of real crazed Albanians who may or may not have spent time in prison — Scott is careful not to be specific — and eventually they jobbed their way into parts in the actual movie. Scott never could find actors to equal his Albanians, and it's easy to see why: They look capable of violence on the screen because they had been capable of it on the streets. "Now they want to be actors," Scott says with a shake of his head, perhaps wondering whether he's saved us from two monsters or created two more.

It's just the sort of question that his movie leaves us asking, and that more movies could benefit from, even summer ones. Not because it's an especially hard question, and not because it's especially important, but because the answer isn't always plain. It hides instead in that great gulf where most of us hide, never quite sure whose side we're on or where we're going to end up.

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